So, it would appear that your loyal fans and followers are not the only people checking out your naked body online. Apparently British spies have been gathering images from Yahoo and have been ‘shocked’ to discover that some of us like to get our kit off in front of other people!
According to a report in the Guardian the UK’s surveillance agency has gathered a collection of Yahoo web cam images and they were pretty horrified at what the so-called Optic Nerve programme revealed. The most shocking thing as far as we are concerned is the fact that the owners of these images had no idea that they were being collected and that none of them were suspected of any wrong doing. So why on earth were images of them being collected in the first place?
The Optic Nerve programme, which was active as late as 2012 allowed the GCHQ to collect one screenshot from Yahoo webcams every five minutes. Neither Yahoo nor its users were aware of this activity and in a six month period in 2008 over 1.8 million images were collected from users in both the UK and the US.
It appears that a trial search was also introduced whereby people were targeted if they had similar facial features to people who were actually under suspicion of illegal activity. This was later shut down but was not the only way that the privacy of innocent people was invaded. If a surveillance agent knew the username of one of their suspects they could also target people with a similar ID.
With more than 1.8 million illicitly gathered images to sift through it’s not surprising that some of them were of naked people. But surveillance agents had some difficulty dealing with the fact that ‘a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.’ They seemingly also struggled with ‘the fact that Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.’
Well, we don’t know about you guys but frankly we’re of the opinion that acquiring images of people without their prior permission is a far greater crime than grown adults making an informed decision to satisfy their own personal sexual sensibilities by getting naked in front of each other.